morrowlife

Here’s another look at that James Monroe statue from last Christmas’s trip to southern Virginia. Cool statue, although it was covered with moss or mold or mildew or something that made old Monroe look pretty bad.

I’m just about out of Great Art for the blog. Need to get out on the weekend and shoot some more. I also need to remember to bring the camera on the train and get some shots of the Patented Beautiful Scenery. It’s so hard to keep up with my insatiable Great Art demand.

Another day of perfect weather. I’m not sure whether any of my Loyal Readers have gotten in the pool today, so there’s no Swimmability Report. The Pool People are scheduled to come over on Friday morning for the official training session. I don’t care much about what they have to say (I’ll listen politely and nod in a grave fashion, of course) but I do want the PDA. We’re all getting tired of walking through the dirt with wet feet to turn things on and off at the panel. We need grass, of course, but it will be a little while before that happens. Besides, we don’t want to walk a bunch of grass clippings into the pool either. The PDA’s the way to go.

I saw an ad for an old Taurus on the company ad website today. It’s a ’93, they say it’s in good shape with new paint (why?), it has a little more than 100,000 miles, the air conditioner doesn’t work (they say it needs something cheap, but if it needed something cheap they would have had it fixed themselves), and they want fifteen hundred dollars for it. I contacted the guy and he told me the car belongs to a retired friend. My experience with retired people says their cars are either absolutely perfect or absolutely horrible. I may have a look and see which this one is. I would rather have a pickup or minivan or something else that can haul lots of stuff as my station car, but this might work. I’m still not sure whether I really need a station car in the first place. It might placate my boss’s occasional raised eyebrows when I have to leave to make my train, but I’m not sure I want to be able to stay later than scheduled. If it’s possible to stay, I’ll be pressured to stay. On the other hand, it’s always good to make the boss happy. Decisions, decisions.

Started looking for rebuild parts for my old Coleman lantern for the HRVA last night. There wasn’t any clear indication on Coleman‘s website that they still carry parts for it, so I asked via email. We’ll shortly see whether they support their old, old stuff or not. If I can get the parts, I’ll get an article written and posted Real Soon Now. Need to finish the Vagabonds writeup first, though.

Too late for many links – enjoy what’s here. See you tomorrow.

See if you can figure out how old Loyal Reader Number Two is. The first one to guess will win honor, glory, and acclaim.

I drove to work again today, so no work got accomplished during the commute. It turned out to be fortunate because I ended up needing to stay for an hour or so after my go-home time. The bottom line, though, is that today’s post is short. Also, no progress on the HRVA article. It will be really interesting when it gets done, though. I need to learn to work on a deadline, huh?

Our digital video recorder crashed yesterday and lost all its saved programs. Loyal Readers One, Two, and Four took it back to Comcast to get it swapped out today, but had no joy. They’re on backorder. Apparently, everybody’s DVR is dying. We’re hoping they have another one for us within a week or so, but apparently they’re not promising anything. I never thought that thing was working right. It was supposed to record “up to” 160 hours’ worth of programming, but we never got more than 40 hours on it before it reported itself totally full. Feh. Time for a new one.

I must admit that I like iTunes 7.0, in spite of its habit of crashing frequently. The new iPod interface is especially nice. It was hard to find the list of folders to be synchronized to the iPod with the old design. No more. I also like the fact that they split things up in the left-side menubar into easy-to-recognize categories. All in all, a much slicker interface. If it would just stop crashing on me now.

LRN1 pointed me to an interesting application that installs the LAMP suite on your Mac (they call it MAMP). It looks pretty cool. I’m downloading it even as we speak and will try installing it on Curly, even though I’m a converted LAMP afficianado with Larry.

Time for bed. See you tomorrow, with more content from the train.

Here’s a scene from this year’s Trier Carnival. As I probably mentioned before, the streets were covered with paper and junk by the time it was over. The street cleaners worked all night – we saw them on our way back from dinner – and the place was spotless as usual by morning. Typical German efficiency. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Well, another week has begun. As usual, the weekend was pretty much a blur. The pool is officially up and running, and we haven’t yet had our first problem. If you don’t count the crack in the deck, of course. Anyway, Loyal Reader Number One and I have officially been In the Pool, although we were only there very briefly. That water is cold! It’s just tap water, of course, and it appears to be slowly warming up, but summer is definitely on its way out here in Lardville, so we’re not entirely sure when it will be warm enough to swim.

On the upside, the spa is working too. I’ve been in twice (or was it thrice?) and enjoyed it immensely. Loyal Reader Number Four and I agree that it’s much more pleasant than the Gardenville spa. That one was a big fiberglass monstrosity that had shaped seats and adjustable jets, and all sorts of cool stuff. The trouble was that the shaped seats had nothing in common with our shapes and the adjustable jets failed to jet anyplace comfortable. We now have a big circle with two-level seats and upper and lower jets all around. We can turn the upper jets, the bubbles, and the light on and off and that’s about it. It’s big and comfortable. Super. We’re definitely satisfied. And we can venture briefly into the pool, knowing that we can warm back up immediately in the spa. I have activity at home evening tonight and I think you can guess what it will be.

We went over to visit the Pool People on Saturday. They analyzed our water and gave us a $100 gift certificate towards pool chemicals. We got a bucket of giant chlorine tablets, a couple of gallons of acid, some shock treatment, and a chlorine floater. That came to $99.83. Seventeen cents left! I think we might get our future chemicals from someplace a little more inexpensive, like WalMart or Home Depot. The Pool People offer unlimited free water analysis, however, which I fully intend to use.

Then we went over to the Pool People’s outdoor furniture store to decide how to spend our outdoor furniture voucher. We were somewhat surprised to learn that they wanted us to spend it essentially immediately or lose it. We found a beautiful teak bench and matching side table and a difficult-to-describe big fire bucket/giant candle thing with two matching metallic tiki torches. We lit the bucket o’ fire on Saturday night and is it ever neat. I’m excited to try the torches too. Maybe tonight.

LRN4 and I also went over to the garden center at Target, where she had earlier seen a big ground cover plant sale. There were some very nice plants on sale, all right, although the sale wasn’t anything to write home about – some of them were a whopping 20 cents off. Be that as it may, we bought about fifteen plants, which are now gracing our wasteland of a backyard in their containers. We need to get the watering system at least figured out, if not actually installed before we get too much further on this thing.

On our way to Target, we saw an old pickup truck for sale along the side of the road. It was a ’91 Ford Ranger and appeared to be in reasonably good shape for its age, in spite of a fairly large dent in one of the front fenders that had been mostly pushed back out into shape. The price wasn’t great but was pretty much in the ballpark for a truck in pretty good condition. We called the guy and he came out to give us a look. It seemed fine – until we started it. The guy had a pretty tough time getting it started, and when I drove it, it hesitated very badly from time to time as if it was running out of gas. The needle was pretty much bottomed out so, just to be sure, I took it to a gas station and put in a couple of bucks’ worth of regular. No change. The overly-friendly owner then tried to convince me that “it probably needs a little tune-up.” Right. If it won’t run right for him, it won’t run right for me. It pulled pretty hard to the right too. I got suspicious when I noticed that they had scraped off the old registration stickers. Did they try to register it but fail the smog test? Something fishy was going on there and the guy was trying way too hard to talk me into it. So I didn’t buy it. Someting better will come along.

Sunday was busy. I taught Gospel Principles again this week and enjoyed doing it. Loyal Reader Number One spoke in sacrament meeting. He did a very fine job and we heard numerous compliments. After church, LRN1 and I went home teaching. We dropped in on one guy we hadn’t heard of before – he was very welcoming and pleasant, if a little crusty – and visited some people we already knew. They’re moving as soon as they can sell their house, but we’ll keep visiting them until then. I worked some on the HRVA website, but only got partway into my article about Henry Ford’s famous camping trips. I’ll try to find the time to finish it up during the week.

Today I worked. Still love it.

— Later —

It’s late at night now. We jacuzzified for activity. To our general satisfaction, we discovered that the pool has warmed up even more and is now just a little bit chilly. The boys spent a lot of time in it, and I jumped in a couple of times too. It’s getting better!

No links tonight – just too late. I’ll come back tomorrow and add a link or two.

That’s about it for today. See you on Tuesday.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One. He’s a little sick today, so I thought I’d let him demonstrate exactly how he feels.

It’s Friday afternoon and the living is easy. Went to work on time and stayed a little late, making up for the day I came in a little late and went home on time. I rode the train for the first time this week and had a pleasant trip. Still no internet connectivity, but no traffic either. My emails had built up during the week to the point that I had 79 unopened messages. Got through all of them on the way in. And now I’m doing a little writing on the way home, after which I plan to read some of the very strange guide to Ruby I downloaded the other day.

The Pool People came today and got the pumps going. Loyal Reader Number One has been playing with some of the controls. He knows how to turn the waterfall and lights on and off and make the spa do its thing. Apparently, there was a pretty big dust storm yesterday afternoon and it left a lot of dirt in the pool, so it was a good thing to start filtering the water. We’ll see if it can clean it up all the way. They left us the creepy-crawly vacuum, but we can’t use it for a week so it won’t mar the plaster while it’s curing. No problem.

Productive day at work today. We’re getting ready for a major presentation next week, and I think I have all my inputs finished. I found out this morning about a couple of backup charts I needed to make. Knocked them out in the early afternoon. Did a bunch of other generic things and completed all the A items on my list and even got to one of the B’s. Not bad.

I instant-messaged with Andy, one of my former colleagues this afternoon. He got out of our commercial operations a month or so ago and is now in the building next door to mine. We’re going to get together for lunch on Tuesday.

There were no links yesterday. Sorry about that. As I mentioned in that post, I cheated just a little and actually wrote it this morning. I posted during a quick break at work but had no time to put links together. I’ll make up for that by including plenty of links today. As soon as they get the internet working on the train again (grrrrr), I’ll be able to do the whole thing during the trip. Happy days to come.

Loyal Reader Number Four and I are going to a Root Beer Social this evening. It starts at 7:30 and we can’t be there until about 8:00, but that’s fine. We’re looking forward to getting to know some people in my High Priest group a little better.

Time to hit the Ruby book. Have a great weekend and look for an update to the HRVA by Sunday night.

Here’s a hitherto-unrecognized pair of twins. The resemblance is amazing.

First, a small disclosure. Thursday was such a busy day I never got the chance to post. Thanks to the magic of Blogger I’m back-dating this so nobody will ever know the difference. Thanks to my loyal readers for their patience.

So what kept me so busy all day? For starters, I actually left work half an hour early to go to the Lockheed Martin Macintosh User’s Group. They have a meeting on campus every month and I wanted to check it out. Sadly, the jury is still out. It turns out the overwhelming majority of members have been retired for many years – or at least have been eligible for retirement for many years – and the level of discussion was at a somewhat elementary depth. On the upside, they showed a fairly interesting training DVD on iMovie. While much of the training was pretty elementary too, I did pick up a couple of pointers (and the most elementary parts made for a very good nap for me and several other meeting-goers). They had some door prizes, most of which I would have been very happy to win. On the upside, I did get an Apple User Group pen, which they said they give to all new members. So I can’t decide whether to pay the ten bucks a month to get their newsletter, which they say runs to about fifty pages a month. Decisions, decisions.

The LMMUG lasted until about 6:00, after which I drove directly to Stockton for a church meeting. They had a general authority giving some leadership training. Unfortunately, I didn’t get there until 8:00, so the only speaker I heard was the GA. His talk was really good, though, and I’m glad I went. Went home after that, had some dinner, and went to bed.

I also had a look at the pool. It’s full now and looks pretty cool. At least it looks cool at night – the pumps still aren’t going and they tell me there’s a lot of crud floating on the surface. Nobody has gotten in yet, although Loyal Reader Number Two did stick his head in and most of the rest of us have waded a little bit. We thought the Pool People would be over sometime during the day to get the pumps started up, but no. Friday, hopefully. I’m working on getting Pool Training on Saturday, but still don’t have confirmation. They want to come do the training during the week, but I told them I’m not taking a vacation day for that. We need to bring them a bottle of pool water for chemical analysis on Saturday and spend our gift certificates for chemicals and patio furniture. Busy, busy, busy.

Other than that, Saturday looks pretty open right now. I need to make some home teaching visits to the people who would probably just as soon not see me. Need to let them make that decision, though. Maybe they’ll all turn out to welcome us with open arms. There’s also a lot of other Ward Mission Leader work that hasn’t gotten done yet this week.

It’s time to get to work on the back yard now that the pool is in. Saturday is my only realistic opportunity to do anything there, so I need to put in a significant effort. We’re still struggling with how it ought to look, but there are many things we can do until then – flatten the dirt back out, get the deck drains hooked up, etc. I think we’re pretty close to at least a basic decision on the overall theme and can start getting ready to at least put in the lawn soon. We need to do that – there’s a lot of dust out there.

I’ve also decided that weekends would be the perfect time to work on the HRVA website. Morrowlife on Monday through Friday and the HRVA on weekends. I’m planning to work a little on the lantern rebuilding project this weekend and research and write an article on the famous old Ford-Edison-Firestone camping trips.

Time to move along. See you tomorrow.